Character Rotation Game

by John Pasden

05 Feb 2011

Fierce Wind Zone

My friend Jason recently brought to my attention this cool logo for a band called 凶风区 (“Fierce Wind Zone”). This brought to mind a Chinese character game I proposed on my Chinese blog years ago in a post called 转字游戏 (literally, “Turn Characters Game”). I’m not sure why I never posted this stuff in English, but I figure better late than never!

Here are the rules of the game as I originally posted them, in Chinese:

Basically, the aim of the game is to take any character and rotate it (most likely 180 or 90 degrees) to get a different character. So focusing on symmetrical characters like 田 is missing the point. The easy example I gave is the pair 由/甲.

And here are some of the solutions I provided (SPOILERS BELOW!), the second row being a bit less strict than the first row:

Some additional solutions provided in the comments of the original post include:

Great! What about just 目and 皿, or is that cheating? Reminds me of a nice game to play on a short train ride. Ask your Chinese friend to find as many characters as they can that involve only a 口 element and two other strokes, of any kind. Examples are 叶， 古， 甲，由，四，只and 史,but there are many, many more, and it can be quite addicting once you start. The fun thing is that foreigners are often better at this game than native Chinese, for some reason.